Student Builds Floating Garden Farm on the East River

We’ve seen New Yorkers plant produce everywhere from rooftops to parking lots, but now there’s even a floating garden coming to the East River. Karim Ahmed, a 22-year-old architecture student at The Cooper Union will soon be anchoring his floating garden into Long Island City’s Anable Basin as an experiment in hydroponic harvesting, and the 20-square-foot raft will sprout sunflowers, kale, corn, and a baby nectarine tree. The floating garden is an attempt to rethink how we grow and obtain our food on this concrete island of a city, and it could spark an awesome new aquatic agriculture trend!

Ahmed had long been interested in the ancient “chinampas” or floating crops of Mexico City. Giant elevated barge-like rafts have been used to grown corn and crops in the city swamps for centuries. Ahmed began a Kickstarter campaign and enlisted the help of Boswyck Farms in Brooklyn to build and fully understand a prototype garden. He then fashioned the structure together at a parts shop in Bushwick.

The floating garden does not use soil, but instead feeds the plants with a water system that blocks outs chemicals and hungry fish. Ahmed’s creation now sits anchored in the Anable Basin, which was also an area recently scouted for a floating beer garden!